Oh, my God.
Oh.
Oh, my God, I haven't seen a picture of her in so long.
Oh!
That's the face I remember.
I hope her soul's at peace.
Please, God, let her soul be at peace.
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
You trusted my mom.
You trusted me.
We put you in just a bad place.
I'm so sorry.
I'm sure there's a part of her that
thought I would protect her.
I failed.
[sniffles]
[quietly] I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
My entire idea
of what happened is just
mud now, it's just...
chaos.
I mean, I know...
that my mother is not innocent in this whole mess.
It was such a confusing time, such a confusing time.
I didn't know really what to believe.
I thought that she was taken over by this man.
That's what I used to believe in my head, and it wasn't her
that was the murderer.
I believe she was taken advantage of.
I'm always gonna be wondering why, always.
And I really, really,
still to this day, wish I did something.
I wish I did something.
I ask for forgiveness every night -- every night.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
-[knock at door] -[creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is one of my favorite pictures of my mom.
She does look happy-go-lucky.
This is her best picture.
Just so happens, it's in the worst place.
And the worst time.
She looks pretty -- pretty okay
for having somebody
almost dead in the apartment.
Yeah, when I think about that, it's hard -- I feel numb.
There was torture in this house.
I know she did everything wrong.
I know it.
But I still love her. It's my mama.
This is a picture of my mom
about 10 years old in her house at Christmas time.
She seemed happy here, didn't she?
But my mom's upbringing was a hard one.
She just didn't feel very loved.
Her parents used to tell her that she was ugly.
She'd never amount to anything.
My mom...
was just always searching for love, because
she didn't get it from her parents.
My mom was raped when she was in her early 20s.
She was going to get an abortion
but decided, you know, not to -- she decided
she wanted to keep me.
She was so needing something to love and love her back.
It took her to a bad place.
I mean, in the end, it was the worst place.
Before any of this happened,
my mom was a single mom trying to raise me
as best as she could.
My mom never laid a hand on me ever,
even though I was rotten child.
AS MARY: Good morning.
Oh, God, what the hell are you doing here?
TAMMY: From what I remember,
my mom's only friend would have been Mary.
I would say nasty things to Mary all the time.
Just ignore her -- come and have some breakfast with us.
TAMMY: My mom would say, "Oh, she's just a kid."
She didn't tell me,
"Don't speak that way
to people, don't do this, don't do that."
It was more like, "Eh, it's all right.
It's not that bad."
She never reprimanded me.
If she would have given me rules
or punished me,
I may have been mad at her, and I think that's
the last thing she wanted was for me to be mad at her.
She just wanted me to love her.
She was looking for love
in every way she could.
She went crazy because of it.
Because of her need for that love.
I lived in a community where there were a lot of
single parents, so it really wasn't
out of the ordinary for there
not to be a dad in the picture.
I remember I was nine years old, and we were watching TV,
my mother and I, and I turned around, and I said to my mom,
"Who's my dad?"
"That's him," and Billy Joel was on TV, and she said,
"He's your dad," and I said, "He's my dad."
She said, "Yeah, that's why you can sing."
Are you serious?
TAMMY: She said when she was younger
that she had an affair
with Billy Joel, which resulted in me.
I said, "Oh, my God, Billy Joel's my father?
This is fantastic."
This is amazing.
My mom even said that Billy Joel's hit song,
"Big Shot," was about her.
She's like, "Don't tell anybody."
I was like, okay.
People will treat you differently.
I believed what my mom said -- I wouldn't have thought twice.
If she says it's a secret, then it's a secret.
Billy Joel obviously wasn't my father.
My mom was very good at creating fantasy worlds.
I think her making that fantasy world is just a way of,
you know, feeling loved, feeling included,
um,
and, you know, making me feel special all at once.
When I was 11, we had a great group of neighborhood friends.
[distant voices overlapping]
Our house was the type of house that everybody came over.
I can remember standing around the kitchen table,
all my friends around the table, and us singing songs
to the top of our lungs, just screaming songs out.
It was -- it was just so fun.
Anybody was always welcome to stay at our house.
Theresa had no parents at all.
She did have an elderly grandmother -- my mom,
she saw that Theresa didn't have a loving family
and a loving home, and she wanted to give that to her.
Harriet was staying with us.
Her parents had issues or what have you,
and she wanted to give Harriet a loving home.
My friend Luis had a great family.
Luis didn't come from a broken family at all.
That's the summer that I met Ricky.
I was 11, and he was 14.
He's very good-looking. Looked like a grown man.
I do remember saying to her, "Mom, we're in love."
We dated for a little bit, and all of a sudden,
he was getting very,
"I don't want you to do this."
-Very controlling. -What's your problem?
You're acting like a child.
And I was like, "Well, that's not happening."
So we got into a fight, he broke up with me.
Fine, who cares?
I was out hanging with my friends.
A lot of these kids would come by us, because their parents
were strict or what have you,
and my mom was always, like, welcoming.
She would scoop them up and put them under her wing.
I know she loved that.
She loved being a mom. She really did.
And she was super, super caring
until...she wasn't.
So I want to ask you a question that I think
might be hard to hear, okay? -Okay, yeah.
There were some reports that your mom's intentions
were not necessarily pure,
that it wasn't just to have the kids over,
that she was kind of luring them.
I know a lot of people
thought that my mom was grooming these children,
but she absolutely was not.
She wanted me to be the happiest person
that I could be,
and it -- I can see
where if you didn't know her past,
I could see where you could say that
she was grooming these kids, but this is just who she was,
and then she met Ricky, and something changed.
A switch went off.
And these poor kids
were, you know, taken advantage of.
How horrible for you to trust somebody
and love somebody so much.
And then they take that trust
and love and just use it against you.
It's just...
that's evil.
That's evil.
TAMMY: My mom was pretty great.
I know I keep saying that,
but to this day, I'm not sure what switch went off.
She was wonderful, and then she was not.
Like overnight.
When Ricky came along, everything changed.
Ricky started sleeping over on the couch.
He ran away from home, which was maybe six blocks away.
There's another, you know, bird with a broken wing
who needs, you know, a place to stay.
Eventually, Ricky moved into the room with my mom.
My mom had told me it
was because the couch was very uncomfortable.
I was young, so I'm not even sure that I was aware
that a relationship was happening, even at that point.
If you ask me my feelings on it,
normally, you'd think that I'd lose my mind.
Oh, my God, my boyfriend is going with my mom.
I didn't feel that way.
I'm not sure if I ever wanted
to know about their relationship.
I don't know how that happened at all.
It just all of a sudden was happening.
PRODUCER: So this is your mother speaking to detectives
about essentially
how she was able to start the relationship
that she was having with Ricky.
She got him into her bed
by saying that she suffered from the epilepsy.
He began sleeping with her to help her
if she got one of these spells.
She was attracted to the young man sexually,
and she told him this,
and that at first he, you know,
resisted her advances, but then she made the statement
to him, "Well I have my needs,
and if they can't be met, then I have to go
somewhere else," and rather than her go
somewhere else, they began to have sexual relations.
TAMMY: I don't know what to think about this.
He could just leave, go home.
Go home.
PRODUCER: I think that it looked very much to you like
he was initiating,
and when I read this, it said to me that I'm not sure he did.
But he felt pressured.
I can see where you can be threatened,
I guess, into having sex with somebody.
This is all really weird.
Ricky had very loving parents who cared
about him, the parents were looking for him.
That's the problem that keeps me from...
believing this fully.
Being there, he appeared willing.
But I should have said something.
Maybe she would have thought twice.
Maybe she would have broken up with this man
or gotten rid of this guy. -This kid.
-I mean, he was a kid. -Yeah, he was a kid. Yeah.
[phone ringing]
I'd be sitting just at the kitchen table,
and the phone would ring, and my mother would pick it up.
-[phone ringing] -She'd listen.
AS MARIE: Hello?
TAMMY: Okay, I understand, I understand.
Hang up the phone,
and then say, "Billy called."
Everybody in the house believed that
the phone call was from Billy Joel.
My mom said that Billy called because
things needed to be taken care of.
Billy was a mob boss, he was in the mafia.
My mom would get instructions from Billy
to tell us who had chores.
I didn't have any chores.
What did he say?
Theresa, you're in the bathrooms.
Harriet, you're doing the dusting.
What about me?
Billy didn't say you had to do anything.
I am out the door.
I'm just gonna go play with my friends.
If they didn't do the chores correctly
or in a certain kind of timeframe,
Ricky was to enforce the beatings.
She was so convincing that it was hard
not to believe what she was saying.
Later on, I found out about her little
tricks from working at the phone company,
and she would make that phone ring.
There wasn't anybody on the end of that line.
[phone ringing]
She was making this person up to everybody else,
and why?
Why were you doing that?
There was definitely a lot that went on
in that house that I was not aware of.
That was all behind closed doors,
what these punishments were and -- and what have you.
PRODUCER: This is Ricky -- he's on the stand,
and the prosecutor is speaking with him.
[quoting prosecutor] How often did these phone calls
come into the house
from this point on?
[quoting Ricky] A couple of times a day.
Every time, like, a chore or punishment went on,
he told me to go into Tammy's bedroom, and I would find
something to do the punishment with, so I did,
and I found a bat.
I don't think I knew what these chores
were that they had to do.
So I just...
I guess I feel like I removed myself
each time that phone call would happen.
It was like I could go and come whenever --
whenever I pleased.
So to be honest, that's -- I hate to say it,
but that's what it was.
I was just selfish, and there was no empathy in me
at that time -- I was just
a selfish little girl only worried about myself, and if it
didn't involve me, then -- then
I'm out, I'm leaving.
There was one day where Ricky came into my room.
He put thumb cuffs on my thumbs.
He put thumb cuffs on my toes.
AS TAMMY: What are you doing?
They are these handcuffs, but tiny enough to put around
your thumbs like little tiny handcuffs.
AS TAMMY: Get these off of me, right now!
TAMMY: He closed the door. He locked the door,
and I was stuck there.
AS TAMMY: Where are you going? Come back!
Somebody help! Mom!
I started hearing Luis,
Harriet, "No. No. Please don't do this."
"You have to do this."
CHILD: Stop doing that! Why are doing this?
TAMMY: You're doing it, you're doing it.
CHILD: Please don't. Just stop!
I start freaking out, you know, saying what's
happening out there, trying to get out of
my thumb cuffs, so I couldn't get out of these thumb cuffs.
Get these off! Get these off!
I could hear them saying, "No, no, please, no, no," and crying.
CHILD: No! Please! Somebody help!
My thumbs now are raw from trying
to wiggle my way out of these thumb cuffs.
Eventually, the door opened,
Ricky came in with my mother trailing behind him.
The whole time, I'm cursing at him,
"Take these off, take these off."
He finally took these things off.
I learned later that my mom
and Ricky were forcing Luis and Harriet
to eat cat [bleep].
Just became something that was out of control.
Whatever this was that was happening,
this torturing, it was crazy.
I can't even imagine the other things that were happening,
but I had more resentment towards Ricky.
I was unhappy with my mom,
but the resentment was towards Ricky.
Ricky seemed like he was getting a kick out of it.
PRODUCER: So there was testimony
that they were told that there were cameras.
Ricky believed he was being watched, he believed that if
he kind of came up with his own punishments, got creative,
that that made him look good in Billy's eyes.
I see. Mm-hmm. I see.
PRODUCER: Does that make you feel any different about
what -- what you witnessed?
No.
Even though I had this new information, uh,
it doesn't make me feel any differently about Ricky.
It looked as if he enjoyed it.
But I think
that I could understand his position
in this fantasy world that was being created.
It seems like day-by-day,
I could see him being afraid.
I could see all the kids being afraid.
[phone ringing]
My understanding as to why they didn't
leave is they were frightened for their lives.
That's probably one of the scare tactics, as well.
Billy's in the mafia,
and if you tell anybody outside of this little group
that we have here, we're gonna hurt people.
They were being told, "If you say anything
"or if you don't come back,
we're gonna hurt your family."
PRODUCER: I want to read you something.
So this is a court document from Luis.
"Did you ever try to do anything to yourself, Luis?"
"I tried to kill myself."
"When?" "While I was going there.
"I was just tired of all the beating
"and everything that happened to me.
"A phone call came, and you know,
"Billy said to Marie that if I kill myself, it won't matter,
"because my family would still be killed.
So that's what stopped me from doing it."
Wow. I had no idea. Wow.
Oh, Luis.
I feel horrible. I feel horrible for him.
I've said I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry did any of that happen to you.
I'm just so sorry.
I'm sure they hate me.
I was the one living my life, running outside,
playing with my friends while they were being tortured.
PRODUCER: Well, let's not forget also, you're kid.
-You were a child. -I was a child.
I mean, the stuff that I read and heard after the fact was
just shocking,
it was just shocking -- to this day,
I'm just like, what? What?
TAMMY: The phone calls eventually stopped,
and then my mother started, um,
[sighs]
becoming Billy.
My mom would put her hands over her face
and kind of just sit like this.
Give it a couple minutes, and then...
up, already the attitude, the anger, the nastiness.
It was almost like she had a different voice.
Everything about her changed, her demeanor changed.
Her look on her face changed.
She was meaner, she was nasty.
She was completely the opposite of who she was normally.
I am sick and tired of you filthy...
disgusting...
creatures.
TAMMY: This thing took her over completely.
We're gonna teach you how to behave.
TAMMY: Theresa
and Luis and Harriet, we were all
just in shock about this big switch.
Her fantasy world
absolutely allowed her to escape from
the atrocities that she was doing to these kids.
I can remember my mom telling me
that I let Harriet go.
That she had something to do with her escape.
PRODUCER: Harriet tried to escape a number of times.
-Okay. -Were you -- did you know that?
No.
PRODUCER: This is a summary from the prosecutor's
opening statement.
"When Harriet ran away, the Elmwood Park
"Police found her walking around on Route 46.
"She didn't have any shoes on.
"She wouldn't give the name of who was doing this.
"She ran for her life, and she's alive
today because she got out of that house."
Good for you, Harriet. Good for you.
I believed that my mother helped Harriet escape
when she told me that she did,
but it doesn't look that way.
Especially if Harriet tried multiple times.
PRODUCER: She gave an address, and they went to Marie's house.
They found a very clear-speaking, eloquent person
in Marie saying, "In my house?
"A child abused?
I wouldn't permit such a thing,"
and they said, "We don't know what to think."
My mom, like, blatantly lying like that?
I mean, it's crushing -- it's just crushing,
just more and more.
It's horrible to hear.
Horrible to hear that
my mom just, "Oh no, not here." Really? Really?
But it was there, and you could be that...
sane, to say that?
And then continue
to allow all that other stuff to go
down in the house, really?
This is Luis on the stand
speaking with the prosecutor.
"I was called into the living room, and Marie said
"that I was going to go home.
"And I was allowed to.
"I didn't have to come back anymore if I didn't want to.
"Ricky was going to give me something
"to remind me not to say anything.
"Ricky told me to put my hands over my head,
"and he beat me with his fist and punched me in my face.
Made me bleed."
AS RICKY: No! No!
"You never went back there again, because you were told
you didn't have to come back anymore?"
"Yes." "Did you keep your mouth shut
like you were told?"
"Yes." "Did you tell the police
what had happened to you?" "No."
"Did you still believe about the mafia?"
"Yes."
"And that you could be killed?" "Yes."
He still kept his mouth shut. That's amazing.
I mean, that's...
just shows how frightened they were.
[quietly] Oh, man, Luis.
Luis, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
I'm just so sorry. I'm just so sorry.
It was a living hell immediately
once we moved into the smaller apartment.
All that was left was the four of us -- me,
Ricky, my mom, and Theresa.
It started to get bad for her.
It was really bad for her.
The torture was at its highest level.
It was the worst it was.
It was out in the open. There was no hiding it.
Theresa would be chained to
the radiator -- whenever Ricky walked past her,
he would kick her or hit her or do something.
They were starving her. She was emaciated.
She was bruised all over.
I asked Ricky if I could give her
some food, he said no, I went to my mom.
And she was like, "Just don't. Just don't, Tammy, just don't."
No.
So then -- so I gave up. I gave up.
I did. I shouldn't have given up.
I didn't say anything to anybody
about it -- I was afraid.
I feel so horrible about not doing any of that
when it could have mattered.
Why didn't I do something?
Why didn't I say something? Why didn't I call 911?
Why didn't I care enough?
TAMMY: While we were in this apartment,
I went to school every day, and Theresa never left the house.
She wasn't allowed to go to school.
At night, Ricky would move her to the bathroom,
where they would handcuff her to the foot
of the bathtub and leave her there all night.
She would sleep in the bathroom
then be brought into the kitchen
all day long,
and Theresa's, like, really in a really bad place.
So then one day I woke up to him manhandling her.
My bedroom was directly across from the bathroom.
So I could see it happen
with the door open.
I saw Ricky...
I keep -- I think he was trying
to, like, make her stand up or something.
She was so weak and broken that she couldn't even sit up.
I was kind of like, "Mom, mom."
She hit her head up against the bathtub, and she just went limp.
The way she went limp
was something I'd never seen before.
Get out of here, now!
My mom said, "Go to school.
Go to school. Go to school."
So I went to school, and I just sat there in class
in shock.
When I came home, I was like, "Where's Theresa?"
I'm not sure who said what,
but they were kind of like along the lines of,
"Don't worry about it. She's okay.
"She's fine. She's taken care of. She's fine."
I'm thinking, "Where? Where, mom?
Where is she? Where is she?"
She's like, "Don't ask any questions,
Tammy, don't ask questions, Tammy."
She was gone.
And I thought to myself,
they killed her.
Oh, my God.
Maybe... maybe, I'm next.
Were you ever told why she was
moved in the morning from the bathroom?
The bathroom had to be available
for you to get ready for school.
It...
[exhales heavily]
I really hope Theresa forgives me...
for not saying something
earlier, for not saving her.
That sucks to hear that, you know, that
this poor girl is...
being tortured, and again, you know, I'm...
being doted on, you know, being taken care of,
you know, that's kind of --
it's crushing -- it's crushing.
[crying quietly]
TAMMY: Ricky went back home.
I was so relieved.
Because for me, he was the reason why everything
started -- before you, everything was fine.
Once you came into our lives, all hell broke loose.
My mom was devastated.
She just stayed in her bed for days,
just saying how much she missed him,
how much she wanted them back.
He goes, "No, I'm not -- I'm not gonna go back."
Then it was get-back time.
He doesn't want me? Okay.
Well then I'm gonna tell the police that he killed Theresa.
And that's -- that's what she did.
Can I please speak to homicide?
That was the first time that I had gotten confirmation
that Theresa was actually dead.
My mom basically went to the cops
and led them directly to the body, to Theresa's body.
I come to find out that after Ricky manhandled her,
and she hit her head in the bathtub,
apparently, they wrapped her up in duct tape,
sprinkled it with lye, and shoved her
in the back of the wall,
put her in between the beams right behind my bed.
I learned that she was actually still alive.
And she suffocated now, because they duct-taped her
entire body.
Oh. Oh, Lord Jesus.
TAMMY: When my mother had originally
told the cops
that Ricky was abusing people,
she had asked me to go and tell the cops
that Ricky raped me.
I guess to make her story better.
I went. I did as she said.
The ship was sinking, and she was
pulling out all the stops at that point
to save herself at that time.
They could just see right through me.
The detectives are like, "Are you sure about that?
Are you sure about that?"
I'm not sure about -- you know, like, no I'm lying, you know.
It was -- I couldn't -- I couldn't hold onto the lie.
I couldn't do it. Ricky never raped me.
No. Never ever.
They sat me down, and they said, "Your mother's being arrested
"for murder, and you're going to go to Family Services.
You're going to go to a foster home."
I'm crying, "No, no, no, no.
"It's not her. It's not her. Ricky did it.
It's not her. Ricky did it."
I thought they had it wrong,
because I watched Ricky
manhandle her into the tub and go limp.
But in retrospect, right, and finding everything out,
that duct tape did her in.
They suffocated her, whoever put the duct tape on her.
Finding out
all of this new information, it's probably...
what has shocked me most
in this interview.
This is a mugshot of my mother.
Look at my mother's face here.
Her eyes.
What the [bleep] was going through your head, ma?
What the [bleep]? What the hell?
What the [bleep]?
She could have stopped it.
Yeah, she didn't even have to start it.
[sniffles] She could have stopped it.
It's a shame. [Bleep] shame.
I don't want to look at this.
The next time I saw her was behind 4-inch-thick glass,
and I visited her like that for the next four years.
I did not ask her what happened or why she did it.
We didn't talk about those things.
She...
would have thought that I would stop
loving her if I knew the truth.
That was a big fear of hers.
Within a few years, she appealed,
and the sentence was overturned.
They gave her, I think, two life sentences
and some more years on the side.
This is a picture of me and my mother in prison.
Now she was off of death row, and I was
able to actually hug her the first time I saw her.
That's why we're holding on really tight.
All intertwined.
I mean, even through all the...
horrible stuff that happened, she still loved me.
I visited her all the time for 28 years.
The last time I visited her,
she had told me that she had a lump here, and that it was
hurting her really badly.
Eventually, she passed away from breast cancer,
and that's where, in the end, she died.
She died in prison.
My foster family, it was wonderful.
Gave me all the love I needed.
I stayed there for about two years,
and then I moved out on my own,
and I've been on my own ever since,
and I've been working full-time
since I'm 15 years old.
Ended up working out well.
I, you know, got my GED.
Um...and here I am.
I believed her all these years.
I believed she was taken advantage of.
But all of that is, like,
up in the air, gone, thrown out the window now.
I still try to make sense of it to this day.
I really do -- I think, oh, God.
You know, is there something --
am I gonna switch, am I gonna, you know,
switch it up, am I gonna become this, you know, person?
I hope not -- so far, so good.
With everything that I've learned,
I believe, you know, Ricky -- Ricky was
a victim, too, just like those other kids.
So now it's time for me to really
sit back and let this new information
kind of seep in.
And I got to figure out where I put it,
where it goes, how I deal with it.